OCTOPUSSY

Roger Moore's
penultimate Bond film is one
of his better efforts, if not in a league with THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and
FOR YOUR EYES ONLY.
Louis Jordan makes for a fairly
decent Bond villains; Maud Adams, in her second go-round as a Bond
girl, is lovely and mysterious as the titular character; and there are
a couple of chase scenes that are good for cheap thrills.
Other
than that, it's the standard Bond formula, well executed. The
lingering image for those disdainful of the Moore years is that of Bond
in a clown suit, but I won't go there.There, I got through the whole
paragraph without making a single wisecrack about the title. ½ - JL

OCTOPUSSY is certainly a mixed
bag, containing
the best and worst elements of the Moore/Bond era. There are exciting
action sequences, including a plane ride that makes me queasy
every time I see it, but unfortunately there are also dumb-dumb sight
gags and inappropriate sound effects (the Tarzan holler?
Really?). The film never makes up its mind what kind of Bond
movie it wants to be.

The clown suit scene
mentioned above is a skillful blending of the sublime and ridiculous. Undercover at a
circus,
Bond must defuse a nuclear bomb smuggled into a circus. It is a
tense, suspenseful sequence in which Bond, under the circumstances,
happens to be dressed as a clown. And Moore gets away with
it! Out of all the actors who portrayed James Bond through
the
years, Moore is the only one who could pull off a scene in a clown
suit, since Moore was widely accepted by this time as the most clownish
Bond of all ("The Most Clownish Bond Of All!" would have been a perfect
advertising slogan for just about any Bond film from Moore's tenure).

Clownishness aside, this is a decent entry of the
series,
one
which features Louis Jordan's classic villain line "You seem to have
this nasty habit of surviving!". I take off one half-point to
punish Roger Moore for his inexcusable punching-up of every double
entendre with his eyes. - JB